ARE THERE EXCELLENT SERVICE FIRMS, AND DO THEY PERFORM WELL

While the construct of business excellence, as defined in the very successful book by Peters and Water-man, had a marked influence on managers in the 1980s, and in all likelihood in the 1990s, it met with some scepticism in academic circles. This was because the construct as conceptualised did not meet the more rigorous requirements of reliability and validity established by critical researchers, and also because many of the so-called Excellent films later showed themselves to be rather ordinary performers at best. Recently, an apparently successful instrument to measure the original Peters and Waterman excellence construct named EXCEL has been developed by Sharma et al., in the United States. In this article the authors describe the rise of EXCEL in a sample of large UK service firms and comment on its reliability and validity. Links are also established between excellence and overall business performance in these films.